All We Have is All We Have

There comes a point in the season of wallowing – that is, August – when all you can do is listen to country music on your porch and drink with the few survivors that you were able to pull out of the flood of time. You kind of want this to last forever, so you mix your uppers and your downers and time distends itself in weird ways. You smoke too many cigarettes, even though you set limits for yourself on how many you can smoke a day, merely because each day feels like two and/or you are so drunk you can’t rightly remember.

And so it goes until the end of August when you have to finally pick up your weary body and motivate yourself. Sometimes taking a break from serious stuff is such hard work. It’s tiring – the getting out of bed, the piling into cars, the organizing of trips to the beach and to Taco Bell. We all cling to each other like shipwrecked half-strangers, not sure exactly how it is we got here but realizing, like it or not, it’s those trips to the beach and to Taco Bell that are going to give our days enough structure to keep functioning. Like it or not, all we have is each other – and all we have is all we have.

It’s something about August – I said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again – that leeches the will to live from a person. There’s something about it that just begs for tragedy to strike, just for the sake of catharsis. The problem about tragedy that I’ve learned is that in its wake all you have is all you have. It’s no different from before, but someone is more traumatized than you were when you started. It’s like some kind of weird emotional entropy. I hope we don’t all go nuts.